Infinite Possibilities and Narrative Entropy

I just finished Bioshock: Infinite to mixed results. This whole thing is full of spoilers for those of you who haven't finished it so I suppose that you should stop reading if you intend to play it.

One the one hand, it tells a well-crafted story about absolution and the impossibilities and false comforts of redemption. That part is great. That part is worth experiencing. What is not nearly as well done is the resolution of the game's aesthetic promise and how it fits in, thematically with the original Bioshock. For those of you not familiar with the game series, both present dystopian cities whose well-meaning credos are taken to horrific extremes, undermining the values that built them. The first game centers on an underwater city called Rapture wherein Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy of sacrosanct self interest plays out, resulting in a society of powerful narcissists seeking to destroy one another as the city crumbles around them.

Bioshock's newest entry takes place in 1912 aboard the floating city of Colombia, a monument to late 19th century spiritualism and American Exceptionalism. Led by a mad prophet cast in the mold of Dwight Moody and Mary Baker Eddy, the society presented in the game takes on some of our core beliefs as Americans and does a decent, if ham-fisted job of making American players uncomfortable with the sins of the society they emerged from. That's fair and par for the course. The most revolutionary thing about Bioshock games from a story-telling standpoint is its willingness to make America the badguy. Both Rapture and Colombia are presented as splinter states, but they distinctly American dystopias, not just fueled by our history but by the rhetorical assumptions that we are somehow special.

The Objectivism of the first game is easy to sell as destructive and problematic. Though Ayn Rand maintains a devoted following in some circles, her theories are generally accepted to be a pitifully simplistic fantasy, attempting to justify greed as a moral imperative. It's harder to justify American exceptionalism as toxic  and the game settles on fin-de-siecle racism as the symptoms of its disease. There is no room for people of color or the Irish in Colombia and the game showcases a lot of uncomfortable, racist propaganda to prove just how awful a place the city is. Case in point, the images to the right:

Bioshock Infinite banks on the twinge of disgust in our gut seeing these images. We are conditioned to disdain blackface, racial slurs, minstrelsy and institutionalized racism and seeing those images placed side by side with the patriotic is jarring enough (though certainly historically justified) to get people to question whether or not the link is necessary. Portions of the game play out (to great effect) like chapters from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The game uses the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Boxer Rebellion as object lessons in American arrogance and cruelty. Colombia is the America that took those lessons as unabashed triumphs. Again there is something laudable in all this. I doubt most people are aware of either event and bringing them center stage is a pretty cool way to make a point about the still extant dangers of believing your homeland to be the messiah of nations.

Unforunately, Bioshock Infinite turns away from this plot in order to tell a personal story about the game's protagonist, a former Pinkerton and survivor of Wounded Kneeand the Boxer Rebellion atoning for his sins by trying to save a maiden-in-the-tower heroine who is more than she appears. About a third of the way through, the game essentially becomes a science fiction yarn about multiple dimensions and causal relationships. By the end your hero, Booker DeWitt is revealed to be the race-baiting prophet, Zachary Comstock from a different reality. The heroine is your daughter and solution to the game is to go back to the moment when DeWitt and Comstock diverged (a baptism) and drown yourself. Very complicated, fairly fulfilling but it necesitates a divergence from the coming race war and its shortcuts left me a little bit uneasy.

Much of the plot of the early game revolves around arming an underground movement called (with sophomoric, winking reference) the Vox Populii. It's led by Daisy Fitzroy, the prophet's former housemaid, wrongly accused of the murder of her mistress. Her rebellion in the works is made up of the city's black, Irish and Chinese populations, working to overthrow the yoke of tyranny and topple Comstock's white-washed hegemony. I was pleased to see a woman of color cast in a major heroic role in a videogame. She also manages to be dressed in an outfit appropriate to a revolutionary and not some cleavage revealing ensemble that belies a well developed character. Say what you will about strong women in video games, no matter how well they are being written they are still, more often than not being dressed in equal parts adolescent fantasy and improbable discomfort.

In order for the game to make its point about multiple dimensions and the trouble with rewriting history, it needs to shortchange Daisy Fitzroy. The game shifts abruptly from having you help arm the rebellion to having you shift into another dimension where the rebellion is already going on and Daisy is on the ascendant. With a few lines of dialogue, the ever-dour DeWitt says "The only difference between Fitzroy and Comstock is how you spell the name." This holds up, Daisy proves to be obsessed with murdering the WASP-y children of privilege and, as she is about to slit a child's throat, Elizabeth, the game's heroine, stabs her in the back with a pair of scissors.

From a narrative point of view, it is understandable that we need to see how both sides of a revolution are subject to blind arrogance and cruelty. For DeWitt and Comstock to be equally guilty and problematic, the political situation has to mirror it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely yadda yadda yadda. The only problem is, the Vox Populii and the Colombian Founders are not equally corrupt body populaces. The game is fairly good about discussing the suffering of innocents in times of war, but it makes the mistake of using real historical racism to make the point that anyone can become oppressed. I'm not saying that it is not possible, in some alternate dimension for a woman of color to be a power-mad eugenics advocate, I'm merely suggesting that we are not there yet as a society to look at that critically.

As I said before, Bioshock Infinite is laudable for its focus on the sins American history: for not blaming racism and injustice on the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws alone--for saying, in fact, that the whole idea of American Exceptionalism is predicated on an exclusionary, white, imperialist vision of the world that trampled numerous cultures and murdered innocents to become an international power. In trying, part way through, to claim that the reactionary revolutionaries are equally to blame as their oppressors, is a simplistic distraction from that story. You and your companion kill Daisy Fitzroy halfway through the game and go on to dismantle Colombia, but her Vox Populii, now leaderless take over from the Colombian Peacekeepers as the game's primary cannon fodder villains. It's as though the game is agreeing with Comstock's assessment of the Vox: anarchists can only ever cause anarchy, if you let oppressed minorities take over, they will run everything into the ground. Racist order is shown to be on equal footing with anarchist chaos.

Again, this is not the crux of the plot and I do not believe the game developers intended this. It's an unfortunate byproduct of shunting the politics of the game off to the side once the character exploration and science fiction emerge front and center. It's disappointing that the kickass woman of color is reduced to an empty symbol while white male characters get lengthy explorations, but I also think it shows a misunderstanding of the game's central theme. The moment that splinters Comstock/DeWitt in two different dimensions: turning one into an arch-villain and the other into a reluctant hero is a baptism some years after the Massacre at Wounded Knee: DeWitt (the good version of the protagonist) refuses to be baptized and Comstock takes the waters willingly. The implication (though it is delightfully subtle compared to most of the rest of the game) is that Comstock mistakes baptism for death and resurrection. He refuses to explore his guilt about Wounded Knee and instead believes that he has been reborn as righteous and holy (taking on the new name, Zachary Hale Comstock as a way of killing off the godless Booker DeWitt). DeWitt, on the other hand, suffers and suffers terribly, is consumed by guilt over the events of Wounded Knee and refuses to give in to the righteous justifications that Comstock makes for his actions. It is a surprisingly complicated moral, especially for a shooter: you don't get to start over. The atrocities you committed don't get wased away when you do the right thing. There is no redemption, only a slow arc--longer than your lifespan--towards real justice.

The game fails to give Fitzroy the same treatment because it mistakes DeWitt's original sin. It assumes that faith in absolution is the lapse. The lapse is genocide. Both DeWitt and Comstock participated in it, and just because one man refuses to end his guilt does not make it less real. Daisy Fitzroy does not have the choice to become anything other than a revolutionary. There is no moment in the waters of baptism where she has the option of turning away and, as a result, she cannot be held to the standards of the game's internal morality when it comes to enacting violence.

And maybe that is the problem with combining multi-dimensionality science fiction with politics. Merely by entering into another world where Daisy Fitzroy won her revolution, the game erases the history of oppression that started the revolution in the first place. This Daisy may not be the same as the one you agreed to arm and that, in and of itself is a letdown. A conceit of Bioshock Infinite's multi-dimensional travel is that you can't actually escape your past or wipe the slate clean. Only DeWitt's death solves the problem of Comstock's tyranny--his death before any of his actions are taken. In that model, we have to assume that Daisy is somewhat stable across multiple dimensions and the game's refusal to acknowledge that is just another way in which she is used poorly. Infinity does not mean infinite narrative possibilities. It only proves that entropy is true in stories as well as physics. When there are millions of subtly different revolutions all happening at the same time, it is hard to really care about the outcome of one.

Bioshock Infinite has a lot of great things going for it (don't even get me started on the beautifully Gothic subplot about the death of Comstock's wife, now interred in a glass coffin and guarded by an order of coffin-bearing, raven-wielding zealots). It is a game that seeks to challenge our beliefs about America's relationship with race and our ability to atone for past misdeeds. Unfortunately, as it tries to do those things simultaneously, it ends up undermining and over-simplifying the  politics that make it so intriguing to begin with.

Mass Effect 3: Stories and the Fans who Ruin Them

So I’ve just heard about the Bioware decision to alter the ending of their wildly popular Mass Effect series after a sustained outcry by fans. As someone who himself recently finished the game and was haunted, but certainly not outraged, by the ending I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think revision makes everything better and Bioware gets an opportunity here to build upon the concepts of their initial ending in order to (perhaps) make something that is, in the long run more satisfying. On the other hand, and this is the more dominant hand for what it’s worth, I do not, in any way, believe that the precedent set by this kind of fan pressure speaks well for the future of artistic integrity in games.

First and foremost, I think it is worth remarking upon the ending of Mass Effect 3 in order to contextualize and categorize the fan outrage, as near as I can figure it. This will contain lots of spoilers if you haven’t already played the game through the end so be forewarned. Essentially, I think the problem with the ending comes down to its abrupt shift in tone, given the third game in the series. It’s a dark shift. Your character, some iteration of Commander Shepherd (in my case the middle-aged, openly gay, morally ambivalent Hippolyta Shepherd), hero(ine) of the galaxy and uniter of various races jumps from Malkuth (earth) to Yessod (the dues ex machine) quite literally. (S)he sees the inner workings of the god machine that powers the galactic extinction event against which (s)he rails and is forced to make a choice. (S)he can A, destroy the Reapers, those diabolic machines that threaten civilization, but in doing so (s)he will kill off an entire race of sentient machines whose rights (s)he has fought for and kill her/his own AI buddy, the spirit of her/his ship with whom her/his pilot has a relationship (it’s not as hokey in the game). (S)he can B, sacrifice her/his life to control the Reapers and force them to abandon their mindful killing but leaving the fate of organic/synthetic life uncertain. Lastly (s)he can also C, use her/his life energy to power a galactic wide synthesis of organic and synthetic life in the hopes of creating a new order that bypasses the cycle of uncertain chaos and cruel order that has defined the entirety of the galaxy’s history.

All three endings are about sacrifice and uncertainty: whether it’s personal sacrifice or the sacrifice of one race to ensure the survival of others, or the sacrifice of all history and all the natural order in an attempt to create something better. None of the choices sit well, especially when most of the game has been spent uniting organic races (and one synthetic race) to fight off their own extinction and put aside old hatreds. Even more, all these revelations come in the last 5 or 6 minutes of the game, the information being delivered by a spectral, artificial intelligence, implied to be a ghostly echo of some unnamed god-like race of individual. So, yeah I suppose I get it. No ending is purely happy. The information is overwhelming and abruptly delivered and, even if it makes sense in the context of the game (all of this is revealed once Shepherd enters the inner sanctum of an alien space station that, for three games, has always been built up as mysterious and full of secrets), seems to be something of a literal dues ex machine. It’s a concern that the player did not know about or understand until seconds before and though thematically congruent with the rest of the series, had virtually no set up.

I personally chose the “synthesis” ending; it made sense with the long narrative of Hippolyta Shepherd’s struggle for redemption. She made many questionable snap judgments over her long career, and giving the galaxy a chance to start over, sacrificing herself in the process seemed fitting. This ending also seems to be the one that the developers prefer, seeing as one had to be particularly thorough and attentive throughout the game in order to “unlock” it. I was surprised in trolling youtube that numerous people refer to the “destroy” ending as the “best” one. To my mind it’s the least heroic. It allows Shepherd to live—barely scrape by—but at the cost of many other individuals. Granted, that may be the value system you play with. One of the best parts of the whole franchise is the ability to make decisions that dynamically alter the plot. It’s not by any means user generated, but it’s very involving. Still, even given the difference in play style I was dismayed by the use of the word “best.” There is this niggling thought that I can’t shake that it’s the best ending solely because the main character survives. That somehow, the outrage of fans is, in part, because there is no way to live and also do the right thing for the galaxy.

Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe, at the end of the day, the other complaints (more legitimate to my mind) about the abrupt shift in tone are what really get under the skins of fans, and not just the inability to live with honor. But there is this part of me that suspects that its about not being able to perpetuate and not being able to end the game entirely on their own terms. And that strikes at the heart of the problem for me. The ending of Mass Effect may be good or bad or somewhere in between, but it does not merit the response from fans. I’ve read a few articles from legitimate and less legitimate news sites trying to encapsulate the debate for the non gamer audience. Invariably, the irate gamers are described as “passionate fans” and though it may technically be correct, I think that characterization speaks to part of the problem. Somehow, being dissatisfied enough with the ending of a story to mount a campaign to get the authors to change it and, in one shameful case, attempt to report Bioware to the Federal Trade Commission for “false advertising,” makes you “passionate,” more involved with the game—more invested in its outcome. I say, it makes you whiny, it makes you misunderstand what storytelling is about, and it sets a very, very bad precedent for how creative endeavors are handled.

I’m a Victorian literature scholar by trade and, as luck would have it, my field has two examples of this kind of fan outrage having an effect. The first is the ending of Charles Dickens’ 1861 Great Expectations which was altered, at the suggestion of monumental hack, Edward Bulwer Lytton, to be happier. The second, an example more similar to our current, Mass Effect, situation, is Arthur Conan Doyle’s capitulation to fan pressure to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after having killed the character off in the short story “The Final Problem.” In both cases artistic intent was subverted by the will of the reader, forcing the author to compromise their original vision. As a literary scholar, both of these instances produce a lot of fascinating scholarship. In the case of Dickens, the two endings can now be compared for endlessly fascinating permutations of theories of novelhood. In the case of Conan Doyle, it produced many, many more Sherlock Holmes stories to write on and enjoy, even if the artistic integrity went over Reichenbach Falls alongside the great detective.

The downside of both of these instances, however, is the laying bare of the power of the fan-base to interfere with the works they purport to love. Much like the 19th century, we are again, living in an age of serialized fictions. They may not come out in monthly papers, but they are broadcast weekly on television and are released yearly in endless sequels to both movies and games. This 20th and 21st century serialized form differs from its 19th century predecessor in one critical way: the stories often do not have endings. We’ve built all kinds of terms into our lexicon for this. “Jumping the shark” for instance, refers to the moment when a story has outlived its usefulness and believability, when we realize that it’s just stalling for time. Furthermore, in the age of outdated Nielson’s ratings, and cruel, artistically bankrupt networks and cable channels pulling the plug on shows before they can even start eyeing their water-skis, fans feel as though they must flex their Jacobin muscles in order to save those stories they think are worth finishing. And lately, they’ve been winning. Arrested Development is set to return. Firefly got its big screen dénouement. Community looks more and more likely to be renewed for a fourth season after a weirdly amorphous hiatus.

But as I said before, there is a downside here. Fans feel like they own the properties they fight to save. And it’s true, in this free market, consumer society where women’s rights advocates can vote with their checkbook and get obnoxious right wing radio show hosts to tremble as sponsors drop like dominoes, we do all “own” a bit of the stories we support. I bought Mass Effect 3 (and 1 and 2) and I watch Community (and bought the season 1 and 2 DVDs) and went to see Serenity and will continue my Netflix subscription, in part, so that I can see the new season of Arrested Development. I’ve paid my money and I’ll be entertained for doing so. But leaving behind this depressing capitalist model, I don’t own any of these stories. They are stories that someone else told and that I happen to enjoy. Just because I invested time in Firefly, doesn’t mean I get to have any effect on its narrative outcome, and, honestly I shouldn’t. I’m not Joss Whedon or any of the writers of the show, or any of the cast and crew members who contributed to its ethos. I’m just someone who liked that ethos and even when I didn’t like where they took it, I have no right to be outraged that I didn’t like it.

The same holds true for Mass Effect. The situation is confusing. Mass Effect 3 is the third in a series of games where the decisions of the players have dramatically altered the story being told. I chose not to kill the insectoid queen of a forgotten alien race in the first game and, as a result, I am rewarded with her support in the third game. I own the decisions but not the outcomes. Bioware wrote a game where both possibilities existed and I just chose what I wanted most. The vast spread of different stories that are possible in the Mass Effect series is not, as I said before user-generated. I didn’t come up with the situations and Bioware owes me nothing as to what choices are offered. Their decision, to rewrite the ending and release it for their fans, is theirs to make, but I am disappointed that they made it under duress. The ending good or bad, was the ending Bioware originally wanted—the ending the story was supposed to have. That people are unsatisfied with that ending is fine, but it’s not okay to demand it be changed. We aren’t storytellers in our role as gamers. We are involved in enjoying the story, but not in producing it.

Gaming is a young industry, much like the novel was when Dickens wrote Great Expectations. It has barely had thirty odd years to establish its story telling conventions and figure out how the bounds of its artistic integrity. What Bioware fans who railed against this ending have done, essentially, is bullied the storytellers into taking back what was intended. I don’t blame fans alone for this. After all, it was Bioware’s decision to change the ending. But it only got to that point because fans demanded that the story be compromised. It will not fix Mass Effect 3 when the new ending is released. A hundred and fifty years from now, we will look back (as we do with Dickens now) and say, look, here are two endings to one game. How do they play off against one another? Mass Effect 3 will never, as a result, have a real ending now. Just a long discussion about why the ending was changed.

I’ll play the new ending. I may even like it more. But why it exists will never sit right with me. I don’t believe I know what a better ending is. And that’s not really the point is it. These aren’t angry fans writing fan fiction to satisfy their need for closure. That would be a creative endeavor and a therapeutic one. Instead, these are fans expressing their dislike for the end of a story and demanding that they be given a better one. The end result of that is Glee. Ryan Murphy takes fan input seriously. As a result, his show has gone from being interesting and intricate and important, to a naratological mess: its characters are wildly inconsistent, its plotlines end too quickly, its excessive desire to please is its own undoing. In the end, the public is fickle, and you really can’t always please everyone. I’ve respected the storytellers at Bioware for years. I really hope this move isn’t the beginning of a long descent into fan service at the cost of well told stories.

Gaming Gaming Everywhere

This is reposted from a little facebook survey that was going around about fifteen video-games that stuck with me. I normally disdain such things but it got me thinking and I ended up with some nice fodder for my trash blog.

1. Final Fantasy IV- Perhaps my all time favorite game (or at leas the one I have the nost nostalgic connection to). Final Fantasy IV (or Final Fantasy II as it was called at the time of it's original US Release, was a point of origin for my understanding of fantasy and my involvement with involving narrative. There were many important books I read as a kid, but this ranks up there with any of them for sheer engrossing pleasure of narrative. It's story, now from the perspective of an English PhD candidate with more than a few loose and baggy monsters under his belt, is simple and laughably poorly translated. But I think it was the simplicity that incited my imagination. Later final fantasies were played and enjoyed (VI, VII and IX especially were beloved) but in becoming more graphically advanced they lost a lot of their charm. Something about seeing a vaguely amorphous outline of a little girl with green hair and a daisy tucked behind her ear, excited my imagination so much more than if she had been fully rendered and spectacularly realized. These characters were much more real to me, because they were so crudely drawn and narrated. Their tawdry demises chilled me to the bone. A game full of wanton self-sacrifice.

2. Actraiser- Very few games can I call my own. I remember that Duck Tales was the first game I ever beat, but Actraiser will always be my game. A charming side-scrolling platformer checkered with a building Sim, Actraiser was, for me, the ultimate antidote to my insatiable lust for mythology. I think what I liked most about it (other than it's truly epic soundtrack-- think: a poorly synthesized Gustav Horst) was it's clear inspiration from readable mythology but divorced from any of its real tropes. Fighting the so-called Arctic Wyvern atop the world tree, was very clearly somehow inspired by Norse Mythology but it was hard to pin down how precisely. Covering a wide variety of world mythological tropes (Greco-Roman, Medieval Catholic, Egyptian, Japanese, Hindu and Norse) and weaving them effortlessly into a pseudo-Christian narrative about bringing light and order back to a world plagued by chaos, was the best thing a bookish 10 year old dreamer could hope for. Incidentally, the game took me precisely one year to beat. I received it for my 10th birthday, and beat it one day shy of my 11th.

3. Super Castlevania IV- I distinctly remember making up silly names for each of the bosses in this game, with my step-sister, Kristen: Dr. Dominatrix, Mr. Nickels, Sir Reads-a-lot. I was recently informed that I was not alone in this process. The writer of the English game manual presented some obvious silliness (the dancing spectres are referred to as Paula Abghoul and Fed Ascare), along with jokes I only got in the last week: Puwexil, the long tongued skull boss of level four, is merely Lixewup (Licks You Up) backwards. Similarly, Koranot, the stone golem, is a phonetic anagram for Ton o' Rock. A great, operatic metal soundtrack alongside traditional gothic horror tropes and ridiculously charming videogame conventions (whipping repeatedly at a stariwell to receive a roast chicken dinner) made Super Castlevania IV a constant source of amusement.

4. Dragon Age: Origins- DA:O, Bioware's recent masterpiece, more than any other game of my adulthood, seems to be in sync with my desires as a writer. It is a sweeping historical epic that integrates historical notes (Just post-crusades Christendom and Byzantium) with traditional, Dungeons and Dragons-esque fantasy tropes. In the case of this latter obsession, it seeks to play an interesting twist on well-worn fantasy conventions. It's elves live as second class citizens (fulfilling the role of European Jews), sticking tightly to their lost and fragmentary culture. Dwarves live underground but have built a fascinating proto-Objectivist meritocracy out of a rigid caste system. Dark and evil powers gather beneath the surface of the earth, but are treated as a real race with actual political designs and ambitions. All this is a fantastic spin on the typical fantasy epic, but I especially laud it's treatment of homosexual relationships. It manages to not pull any punches in allowing your avatar to be gay, bisexual or otherwise questioning heteronormative identity. It does so flawlessly, not only offering the complete freedom to make those choices but slotting it in to a world that is not always accepting. In a dialogue with pan-sexual, ethical slu/elven assassin, Zevran Arianai about my avatar's choice to ultimately pursue a heteronormative relationship, he sighs sadly, saying that, when it comes down to it, people usually choose the less difficult path. Hooray for frank and honest assessments of interpersonal relations, even in the most highly wrought and intricate fantasies.

5. Mass Effect 2- Arguably, Bioware's best game to date. I don't go in for shooters. I don't go in for sci-fi. But I unabashedly love this game. I love it for the reasons that most people cite: it's open-ended plot based off of impossible moral decisions, it's extremely well-written and voice acted characters, it's adherence to a grim plot about Lovecraftian horror. But the standout thing to me was its ability to integrate a very traditional set of quest-based tropes into a plot that made sense. The main thrust of the game revolves around recruiting a team of top operatives, outlaws and oracles to combat impossible odds, outside the strictly legal domain of civilized space. In securing the loyalty of your companions you must perform a variety of mundane tasks to resolve their own psychological issues. Presented to you by a shipboard psychiatric evaluator, who knows that with a team as unstable and self-involved as yours, distraction and unresolved issues could mean the difference between success and failure. This all comes together in a final mission where each and every relationship forged is tested and utilized in the achievement of a greater goal. The game rewards not just your strength and agility, but your interpersonal acumen and understanding as well. As a final note, Jack, the hard-living, batshit crazy, cyberpunk heroine, might be one of the greatest characetrs ever created.

6. Musya: The Classic Tale of Japanese Horror- I played this game over a weekend when I rented it for the SNES from the now defunct Blockbuster. It's a repetitive, little platformer with a really lousy interface and control system. But it was the first time I had any experience with the Japanese Gothic. The new exposure to giant, badger-like monstrosities in conical, rice padyd hats, tortoises with the face of infants, and living, bronze-age figures, possessed by ectoplasmic organs, oozing from its eyes was so startlingly frightening that I couldn't sleep for weeks afterward. As a Gothic scholar, I think I will always consider Japanese Horror to be several steps beyond me, unfathomably strange and far far more creepy than the western tropes I am used to.

7. Super Metroid- This was the game I played with my dad and sister. Years earlier we played Super Mario Brothers III (after being literally awe-struck by its pressence in The Wizard, a film we went to see because it starred one of my mom's ex-students). While the trials of the angry sun and the novelty of Hammer Brothers Suits held our attention for many weeks, it was Super Metroid (a gift for my 13th birthday) that really brought us together as a family. I won't easily forget the moment we came home from Junior High to find my dad triumphantly declaring his victory over the Mother Brain then watching eagerly as we beat it for ourselves. More than it being a family experience, we really fell in love with the aesthetics of the game as well as its novel gameplay. I marveled at seeing the suggested, flooded ruins of Meridia, or the Alien-esque gothic terror of a Wrecked Ship, while my dad meticulously used the X-ray Scope to hunt down each and every missile upgrade, increasing our overall completion record to 96% (never could find that last Super Missile pack). A game of shocking moments, and clever tricks, based upon an intriguing system of opening up new places by finding upgrades to physically power yourself there, Super Metroid might be (for my money) the greatest platformer of its time, and one unequaled by modern attempts.

8. Secret of Evermore- One of the first American games I ever played, Secret of Evermore was a strange, aiming-for-funny mishmash of 50's B-movie sci-fi tropes and classic, sword and sandal epics, wherein a Boy and his Dog explore the temporally replete world of Evermore in an attempt to get back to Podunk, USA. With a dog companion that transforms with your environs (from hulking Cave-Dog to Egyptian Pharaoh Hound to Fluffy Pink Poodle, to Flying, Dog-faced Laser Toaster) and a variety of alchemical formula that require diligent resource management (Three Parts Water to One Part Ash gets you an acid-rain storm), the travails of toe-headed cinema buff Isaac (always named Isaac in my games--not sure why) was a staple of my young life. I predictably loved the Ancient and Medieval portions of the world, alive with gothic castles, temples full of minotaurs, and Stargate-esque alien invaders.

9. Donkey Kong Country II: Diddy's Kong Quest- Pirate themed with steampunk underpinnings, a surprisingly rocking soundtrack and demeaningly cute animal companions, DKC2 was everything I wanted in a light-hearted platformer. It struck the perfect tone and introduced me to thematic biomes. Sunken, ,muck covered pirate ships crashed in the bayou, oddly zen andscapes of twisted brambles, and intense sequences in which rhinos had to smash their way through the honeycomb labyrinths of malevolent bees. As anarchic and tongue-in-cheek as it was genuinely pretty, DKC2 really changed the way I looked at Apes and Crocodiles, and made me believe, if only for a moment, that Snakes could coil tightly into a spring and bounce to great heights.

10. Grim Fandango- Scott McCloud in his briefly lived Computer Game Blog Comic described Grim Fandango as the closest game to Art he had ever played. I have to agree. Video Games are moving towards high art, and the debate can rage on as to which have actually achieved that status or if it yet to be conquered, but for my money, Grim Fandango is already there. I grew up playing Tim Schaffer Lucas Arts adventure games (Monkey Island, Sam and Max, The Dig), but Grim Fandango seemed designed for me. A truly organic vision combining Aztec and Mayan mythology with Golden Age of Cinema Film Noir, Grim Fandango followed the exploits of spun-sugar skeleton, Manny Calavera, a hapless travel agent caught up in a twisting labyrinth of insurance fraud, beatnik poetry and blood-sacrifice. It got me in touch with my Mexican roots while reminding me of the greatness of Chandler-Bogart films. You really don't know what you are missing until a tiny, talking skull with Peter Lorre's voice tells you about his trek to the 9th Underworld.

11. 7th Saga- The Enix adventure game had the highest disparity between integrity of musical composition and quality of synthesizer I have ever seen. I still will get some of the music stuck in my head and any of my grad school friends can tell you that I obsessively play certain tracks on endless repeat while I write my papers. The game had an incredibly difficult learning curve and was plagued by a panoply of random encounters. It also had a fantastic central conceit of being able to play one of seven mercenary types competing for a set of seven ancient runes. Each of the seven played slightly differently (though I always played as Lejes Rimul, the magic-savvy demon prince) and allowed for a large number of strategic combinations by allowing you to team up with another one of the playable options.

12. Sanitarium- It's hard choosing one serious Adventure game for this list. Stephen Spielberg's sci-fi archeology epic, The Dig certainly was a close runner up. But there is something about Sanitarium's central conceit of a character trapped in his own paranoid fantasies that made me shiver. Very few games have given me literal nightmares but this was one of them. It was also one of the last games my step-dad and I played together, making it especially important. It's hazy dream-logic where nightmare sequences involving Midwestern children slowly rotting away into plant matter, unspeakable Aztec curses, terrifying circus sideshows and insectoid invaders from outer space, contained the seeds of a real life tale of corruption and betrayal. It was a game about horrifying mysteries where the mundane and bureaucratic turned out to be the most horrifying prospect of all.

13. Shining Force- My friend Casey first introduced me to Shining Force in the form of a pen and paper roleplaying game, meticulously based on the Turn Based Strategy game. There were certainly other games I enjoyed. But Shining Force was the reason I needed a Sega. The game, like Final Fantasy IV, was one of those situations where less was more. Casey and I not only played a few rounds of the pen and paper strategy game, we ended up making intricate back stories for its 30+ playable characters in the hopes of writing a novel. There was just enough personality in the portraits of each character to suggest a real history and a corresponding fondness for each of them. To this day I have a lot of trouble remembering what was fact and what was my own imagination.

14. Arcanum- My friends have labeled this game a triumph of style over substance. An amazingly story well-told, with pitch perfect Victorian social mores, in a frustratingly (and sometimes hilariously) buggy game engine whose learning curve was butterfly knife sharp. Alongside my step-dad's Victorian roleplaying game and Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Arcanum formed the trifecta that would lead me into Victorian Literature Scholarship. It's a little bit embarassing to admit that my career was inspired by comics, DnD and video games and not, say, by reading Middlemarch for the first time. Coming back years later though, its amazing how much of the 19th century they really capture: Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne, Gaskell-- with a healthy dose of Darwin and Faraday thrown in for good measure. Everything from a misguided faith in electro-magnetism to a supernatural recreation of the Jack the Ripper murders, Arcanum created a world that was essentialized Victorian. Obviously it copped to some Steampunk influences along the way, but unlike Steampunk, it first and foremost loved the society and aesthetic of the era it amulated, not just the technology. I wish the Steampunk movement were more like Arcanum. And whatever its bugs, Arcanum was, and is, my vision of my field and my life, in private, indulgent moments.

15. Sword of Vermillion- The first real role-playing game I ever played. Its instruction manual (a monstrous 100 page guide) served as a major source of inspiration, and I spent hours trying to illustrate the strangely named weapons and armor (graphite sword? carmine shield?). Monsters grunted with now-comical exuberance. The endless expanse of brightly colored yellow pillars that was apparently supposed to be mountainous terrain is still comforting to me. I still have the muscle memory of the difference in feel between cutting through a giant floating eyeball, and a serpentine Medusa-ling. Probably invented. Definitely affective.